urt of Chancery
told you not to do, you were committed; whilst if you refused to do
what it had ordered you to do, you were attached; and the difference
between committal and attachment need not concern the lay mind.

To pursue the subject further would be to plunge into the morasses of
the law where there is no footing for the plain man; but just a word
or two may be added on the subject of punishment for contempt. In old
days persons who were guilty of contempt _in facie curiae_ had their
right hands cut off, and Mr. Oswald prints as an appendix to his book
certain clauses of an Act of Parliament of Henry VIII. which provide
for the execution of this barbarous sentence, and also (it must be
admitted) for the kindly after-treatment of the victim, who was to
have a surgeon at hand to sear the stump, a sergeant of the poultry
with a cock ready for the surgeon to wrap about the stump, a sergeant
of the pantry with bread to eat, and a sergeant of the cellar with a
pot of red wine to drink.

Nowadays the penalty for most contempts is costs. The guilty party in
order to purge his contempt has to pay all the costs of a motion to
commit and attach. The amount is not always inconsiderable, and when
it is paid it would be idle to apply to the other side for a pot of
red wine. They would only laugh at you. Our ancestors had a way of
mitigating their atrocities which robs the latter of more than half
their barbarity. Costs are an unmitigable atrocity.

5 EDWARD VII., CHAPTER 12

The appearance of this undebated Act of Parliament in the attenuated
volume of the Statutes of 1905 almost forces upon sensitive minds an
unwelcome inquiry as to what is the attitude proper to be assumed by
an emancipated but trained intelligence towards a decision of the
House of Lords, sitting judicially as the highest (because the last)
Court of Appeal.

So far as the _parties_ to the litigation are concerned, the decision,
if of a final character, puts an end to the _lis_. Litigation must, so
at least it has always been assumed, end somewhere, and in these
realms it ends with the House of Lords. Higher you cannot go, however
litigiously minded.

In the vast majority of appeal cases a final appeal not only ends the
_lis_, but determines once for all the rights of the parties to the
subject-matter. The successful litigant leaves the House of Lords
quieted in his possession or restored to what he now knows to be his
own, conscious of a vic